Low-Cost Cloud Stack Cheatsheet Low-Cost Cloud Stack Cheatsheet

When a project is pre-revenue, every dollar spent on infrastructure is a dollar not spent on the product. The good news: managed and serverless platforms now give you production-grade hosting, databases, and CI/CD on free tiers, and low-cost VPS providers give you a full server for the price of a coffee. This is the reference I reach for to keep cloud spend near $0 until usage justifies more. For the AWS-native path once you outgrow these, see my CloudFormation cheatsheet and boto3 cheatsheet.

Note: Prices below are early-2026 ballparks and change often. Treat them as relative comparisons, not exact quotes, and confirm on each vendor’s pricing page.

Golden rules

• Start on free tiers + serverless (scale-to-zero). Bills rise only as usage does.
• Managed platforms over your own servers until you genuinely can’t.
• One tool per job. No duplicate SaaS paying for the same capability twice.
• A cheap VPS often beats a hyperscaler for fixed, predictable workloads.
• Watch data egress. It is the silent line item, cheap or unmetered on OVH/Hetzner, expensive on the big clouds.
• Move to AWS/GCP/Azure only when scale, control, or compliance demands it, not before.

Managed services cost comparison

Low-cost cloud & VPS providers

When you want a real server (fixed price, full control) rather than a managed platform, these are the cost leaders:

Canadian options (data residency)

If you need data to stay in Canada, you have two routes. First, the big clouds and several budget hosts already run Canadian regions, so you get residency without a Canadian vendor:

• AWS — Montreal (ca-central-1) and Calgary (ca-west-1)
• Azure — Canada Central (Toronto), Canada East (Quebec City)
• Google Cloud — Montreal (northamerica-northeast1), Toronto (northamerica-northeast2)
• OVHcloud — Beauharnois, Quebec
• Vultr / DigitalOcean — Toronto

Second, Canadian-owned hosts (data stays in Canada, local billing/support):

For most projects the cheapest Canadian-residency option is simply an AWS/OVH Canadian region or a Toronto Vultr/DigitalOcean droplet; the Canadian-owned hosts are worth it when local ownership, support, or procurement matters.

Quick picks

The “just tell me what to use” version:

• Marketing / static site → Astro on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages (free)
• App frontend → Next.js on Vercel
• API / backend → Railway (or Render)
• Database → Neon (Postgres), or Supabase if you also want auth + storage
• Auth → Supabase Auth or Clerk
• Cheap always-on server → Oracle Cloud free tier, or a Hetzner / OVH VPS
• Canadian data residency → an AWS/Azure/GCP Canadian region, or a Canadian-owned host (below)

Total monthly cost: day one vs traction

Cost traps to avoid

• Running an always-on VM for a static site (a CDN host does it for free).
• Over-provisioning a managed database when serverless scale-to-zero fits.
• Defaulting to a hyperscaler when a $5 VPS would do — hyperscaler egress, NAT, and per-GB storage fees add up fast.
• Ignoring data-egress fees — cheap/unmetered on OVH and Hetzner, expensive on AWS/GCP/Azure.
• Jumping to Kubernetes or a full AWS build too early — complexity you don’t need yet.
• Buying annual plans before you’ve validated you’ll use the service.

When to move to AWS / GCP / Azure

Graduate off the free tiers and cheap VPS boxes when one of these is true:

• Cost crossover — your managed/VPS bill exceeds equivalent hyperscaler cost at your usage.
• Control — you need VPCs, private networking, or specific managed services the cheaper providers can’t give.
• Compliance — SOC 2 / PCI / data-residency requirements a budget host won’t meet.
• Scale — traffic or data volume outgrows the platform’s ceilings.

At that point, keep the same discipline: infrastructure as code (CloudFormation or Terraform), and only provision what the numbers justify.

The whole point: spend on product, not idle servers, until the revenue is there to fund them.